Using Crowdsourcing To Identify Vancouver Rioters 397
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "The Canucks' loss in the last game of the Stanley Cup Finals resulted in complete mayhem in downtown Vancouver. Everything from upturned cars set alight to looting was commonplace. Unfortunately, most of the perpetrators were able to maintain their anonymity by disappearing into the crowds. Fortunately, bystanders took several pictures and videos of the carnage. Now, websites (including both Facebook and Tumblr) have set up pages to use crowdsourcing to identify the hooligans."
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
However, the hockey game is unlikely the true reason behind the riot. The rioters were prepared to riot. They brought the tools with them to set fire before the game even started. Many of the arrested were known rioters, who caused problems before the Winter Olympics in 2010.
!CCTV, !privacy invasion, !crowdsourced policework (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a case of CCTV. Rather, these images have been submitted from mobile devices and cameras.
This is not a case of privacy invasion. People have committed criminal acts out in public, fully knowing that people are filming. They're begging to be identified.
Furthermore, the police did not set up these facebook pages; these are set up by concerned citizens who are appalled by the behaviour seen last night. The police have set up a system for submitting evidence, but they have not started a "crowd-sourced" identification initiative as of yet. So maybe the police is doing crowd-sourced evidence gathering, but certainly not analysis.
I want to point out how the police behaved in this riot. They stood their ground, but did not use an unnecessary force. They rarely engaged directly with the rioters; they just held a line, and occasionally fired tear gas, flashbangs, and pepperspray into the crowd. This is one recent case of police in the news NOT confiscating/breaking everyone's recording devices.
I think the Vancouver police and the RCMP deserve some commendation for how they handled this riot. They did not prevent as much property damage as they could have, but on the otherhand, they took a far more measured approach to interaction with the rioters than has been taken in the past and they are seemingly embracing social media, rather than raging in fear of it.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Disclosure: Dad was the arson inspector for my old home town.
Not a poor arsonist, just unfamiliar.
Put just one sheet of newspaper, crumpled into a ball and ignited, under the seat.
One pound of foam rubber seat cushion is equal to one pound of gasoline. The car will burn completely down to the frame, the rims will melt, and there will be absolutely no evidence of how it was done. That's because the ashes of the paper will either be obliterated by the firefighting water, or the air turbulence of the fire itself.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Vancouver housing prices weren't the cause of the riot. Neither were disaffected youth angry about the cost of living.
While the housing market is grossly overinflated, the rental market is sane. Young people simply rent instead of buying, and rent quite nice places too because the main driver of inflating housing costs are foreign investors buying up all the condo stock. Metro Vancouver's unemployment rate (7.6%) is lower than Canada's overall, and has been pretty constant for the last decade. There's no large, pent up reservoir of anger.
Employment rate is not always the best indicator as people are often underemployed. The common term is the "working poor" and it is well documented:
"""" Seth Klein with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says that's because a lot of British Columbians make very low wages. "They can't make ends meet. They're faced with terrible trade-offs between paying the rent, feeding the kids, or heating the house." """
- http://www.news1130.com/news/local/article/241285--bc-has-highest-child-poverty-rate-of-all-canadian-provinces [news1130.com]
""" The poverty rate for people of all ages in BC also rose to 12 percent. It was the highest overall poverty rate of any province for the 11th consecutive year. """
- http://mostlywater.org/bcs_poverty_rate_still_highest_canada [mostlywater.org]
""" Despite the manipulation of statistics by various government agencies, more people are hungry in this country and in this province than we have seen for a long time. Food banks are multiplying, each one reporting that there is not enough in contributions to meet the need. It is reported that 700,000 people in Canada rely on food banks to feed themselves and their families... The fact is that the majority of the poor in Canada and in British Columbia are working. """
- http://www2.canada.com/oceansidestar/news/story.html?id=418878d9-429c-4361-acf5-c06f05079302 [canada.com]
Also, I'm not sure how renting from foreigners who are driving up and/or controlling condo prices contributes to peace of mind.
Re:!CCTV, !privacy invasion, !crowdsourced policew (Score:4, Informative)
The Vancouver Police and RCMP (Abbotsford, Surrey, Maple Ridge, and probably most of the cops in the metro area) knew that if they pushed too hard it would get bad.
I watched the news on CBC and CTV live, and CBC itself has enough video to catch the people who set the cars on fire, because 4 of those cars (the prius?, the truck, and the two copcars) were right outside the CBC's offices. CTV has video of people looting the HBC and London Drugs because Rob Brown was caught right in the thick of it.
As for the police breaking up the crowds, what they did was broke them up starting in front of the CBC and Canada Post area and whittled them down by barricading the streets using the riot gear and making the crowds smaller and smaller, eventually there was just one group of probably 100 people who continued to vandalize things, but the perps who started it were probably long gone by then.
And contrary to media reports, some of the people in the buildings were employees keeping looters out, they were plainclothed and had fire extuingishers.
The Coach store, was looted (you can tell from TV) and that's probably the only store that was actually carrying expensive items near the windows. London Drugs and HBC, the window/door areas tend to be where cosmetics and checkout tills are, so I imagine the dollar value in merchandise stolen was probably in the low thousands, and the actual glass and building damage might exceed the merchandise losses. The coach, LV, Hermes, Tiffany and Gucci stores are all located around the same Hotel, but the coach building is more visible. The LV store is actually located inside the Hotel, so if they smashed the windows they might have got away with the display items in the window, but not much else.
The Futureshop, people were trying to get into, but I can tell you that would have failed since it's on the second floor and has the same kind of barricade the London Drugs has. The London Drugs people actually kicked-in the barricade. My observation here is that the barricade failed because it wasn't designed to have 10 people kicking it for 20 minutes with no law enforcement around.
The Sears was broken into, as well. Again, the same as the London Drugs and the HBC, mostly cosmetics and checkout tills are near the entrances.
Photos and Video, everyone not looting had their camera out, the VPD has appealed to the public to send them all the photos and video.
Note that a lot of these were smartphones, did you know that the EXIF data will not only tell the cops where you were, but what time, so your photos can be triangulated with other peoples images to pinpoint the instigators.
On the other hand, also note that people came up from Seattle and Victoria. So 100,000 people downtown, and those people who came up to start things may have not even be from the Vancouver area.
Some fault of the riots happening can be pinned on how much checking they were not doing to prevent people from bringing bags and lighters/matches.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
Vancouver is similar to the worst US cities before the housing bust. It costs 11 times the average income to buy the average house. This would put servicing housing debt at 72% of your gross income.
1) that's still not as bad as New York City, and I don't see massive sports-related riots there when the Yankees lose.
2) look at the rioters - the average age was probably under 24 - I don't care where you are, 24 year olds are not buying homes these days
3) the same thing happened when the Canucks lost in '94, and housing prices were not much of an issue back then
Pissed off, impressionable, DRUNK hockey fans caused the riot. Occam's razor - why try to read social injustice and malaise into an act when booze and testosterone will do just fine...